The following incidents given in Macy's "Political Parties in The United States," pages 209 to 211, are illustrative of the state of public excitement preceding the Civil War. In an effort to dictate the slave policy of the west, Charlie B. Lines, a deacon of a New Haven congregation, had enlisted a company of seventy-nine emigrants for the war. A meeting was held in the church shortly before their departure, for the purpose of raising funds, at which many clergymen and members of the Yale College faculty were present. The leaders of the party announced that Sharpe's rifles were lacking and that they were needed for self-defense. After an earnest address from Henry Ward Beecher, the subscription began. Professor Silliman started the subscription with one Sharpe's rifle; the pastor of the church gave the second. Fifty was the number wanted. Then Beecher announced that if twenty-five were pledged on the spot, Plymouth Church would furnish the rest. Churches in both sections had by that time become agencies for propagating hatred. Another incident is a southern one. Colonel Bufort of Alabama sold a number of his slaves valued at $20,000, and invested the money to equip a troop of three hundred soldiers to fight for southern rights in Kansas. "The day that Bufort's battalion started from Montgomery they marched to the Baptist Church. The Methodist minister solemnly invoked the divine blessing on the enterprise; the Baptist pastor gave Bufort a finely bound Bible, and said that a subscription had been raised to present each emigrant with a copy of the Holy Scripture." This battalion left for the west armed with Bibles and Sharpe's rifles. The existence of such a condition of excitement made it an easy matter to precipitate war.